Nice Criticism Is Good When It Tells

It Is Always Self-defeating To Pretend To The Style Of A Generation Younger Than Your Own; It Simply Erases Your Own Experience In History.

The Motion Picture Is Like Journalism In That, More Than Any Of The Other Arts, It Confers Celebrity. Not Just On People - On Acts, And Objects, And Places, And Ways Of Life. The Camera Brings A Kind Of Stardom To Them All. I Therefore Doubt That Film Can Ever Argue Effectively Against Its Own Material: That A Genuine Antiwar Film, Say, Can Be Made On The Basis Of Even The Ugliest Battle Scenes ... No Matter What Filmmakers Intend, Film Always Argues Yes.

My Dislike Has No Consequences. It Accrues Only In My Mind—like Preserves On A Shelf Or Guns Zeroing In, And Never Firing.

A Favorite Strategy Was The Paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed Immediately By Wrong. This Linear Invitation To A Mugging Was Considered A Strategy Of Wit.

And Then There Were The Wallflowers Who Had Recognized For Years That The Thing Was Hopeless, Who Had Found In That Information A Kind Of Calm. They No Longer Tried, With A Bright And Desperate Effort, To Sustain A Conversation With Somebody's Brother, Somebody's Usher, Somebody's Roommate, Somebody's Roommate's Usher's Brother... The Category Of Wallflower Who Had Given Up On All This Was Very Quiet, Not Indifferent, Only Quiet. And She Always Brought A Book.